Heat Lightning

photos of the five men executed by the Vietnamese for the crime in Vietnam.
    Davenport tipped friends at TV stations and the newspapers, and after the press conference—a sensation that quickly spread from Minnesota to the evening talk shows in Washington—they’d perp-walked the two Homeland Security guys, something that was never done, so there was lots of film available.
    After the perp walk, they gave the two guys the mandatory phone call.
     
 
THE U.S. ATTORNEY served a habeas corpus on the Ramsey jail six hours after Cartwright and Arenson went inside, and put them on a plane to Washington, where they became unavailable for comment.
    Mitford had a package of the local crime scenes and family photos on an earlier plane, to the same destination, a half hour after the governor’s press conference. When the Homeland Security fanboys went on the Washington political shows, they were greeted with the photos and “How do you explain this?”
    A few tried to float the idea that although this was a fantasy dreamed up by a longtime opponent of the administration, that if it hadn’t been a fantasy, it would have been a pretty good deal, giving up these six criminal Americans while saving all those hypothetical lives somewhere on the West Coast.
    That didn’t fly worth a damn. How many hypothetical people died, anyway? Then an Internet guy in Indonesia learned that one of the Indonesian al-Qaeda plotters ran a lawn service, and posted a photo showing the man pushing an ancient Lawn-Boy. There was an international guffaw at the expense of Homeland Security.
    Blah-blah-blah-blah.
    In the end—after two weeks, anyway—Mitford was proven correct. The governor was a national figure, both admired and reviled, who further confused the issue by giving a rousing pro-gun, anti-Vietnam-killers speech at the NRA convention.
    A good time was had by all.
     
MEAD SINCLAIR went back to the University of Wisconsin, where, it turned out, nobody much cared about what happened in the sixties. A week after he got back, though, he was spit upon by an aging hippie while he was walking down State Street, and Sinclair punched the hippie in the head and knocked off his glasses, which broke when they hit the sidewalk.
    Sinclair was later taken to the hospital for observation after a possible heart attack, but the heart attack was not confirmed. A student photographer, arriving too late for the actual fight, got the hippie to put his glasses back on the ground where they’d fallen, then took a neat photo of them with the light shining through the cracked lens, with a drop of dried nose blood, and the cops in the background. The photo ran in the student paper, the unannounced “reconstruction” was revealed in a letter to the editor, and the student was fired by the newspaper.
     
 
JANEY SMALL told Virgil that their night of passion couldn’t happen again, because it was too depressing. Virgil agreed, which set off an argument, and he fled to Mankato.
    While he was there, a man named Todd Barry called from the New York Times Magazine and said he’d talked to Sinclair about it, and that they could use twenty-five hundred words each for two articles, to run sequentially, on the Great Caterpillar Heist & Vietnam’s Revenge. Virgil told him he could have the stories in two weeks. Barry asked him if he was sure he could get permission from all the sources. Virgil said, “Fuck a bunch of permission,” and Barry said, “We could get along.”
     
THEN MAI called from Hanoi.
    When she called, Virgil was sitting in a country bar talking to a woman named Lark, an opium addict who was accused of boosting thirty thousand dollars’ worth of toddler jeans out of a Wal-Mart supply truck as the truck had sat unattended overnight in a Wal-Mart parking lot. According to the local cops, Lark had driven her boyfriend’s Ford F-350 Super Duty up beside the tractor-trailer, cut her way through the side using a Sawzall run off a Honda generator, and then filled up the longbed pickup with the toddler clothing. She was not believed to have had time to get rid of the loot, but nobody could find it. They were hoping that a thoughtful threat from Virgil might help, since Virgil had at different times arrested her boyfriend, father, and brother.
    When Virgil’s phone rang, he looked at it, saw the “Caller Unknown,” opened the phone, and said, “Yes?”
    “Virgil?”
    He picked up her voice and turned away from Lark, into the booth. “Mai? Where